Religion in its 'death throes'

British philosopher A.C Grayling joins Lateline to discuss whether religion is enjoying a resurgance or dying.

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Religion has proved to be one of the most resilient features of society across centuries. Indeed a number of books in the past year have argued that religion's enjoying a resurgence.

One famous philosopher disagrees, and instead believes that rather than a revival, we're now witnessing religion's death throes.

Professor Anthony Grayling, who goes by his initials A.C. is one of Britain's best-known intellectuals.

He's a philosopher at the University of London and the author of more than two dozen books.

Professor Grayling is in Australia for several speaking engagements and he joined Lateline a short time ago from Perth.

Professor Grayling, thankyou for being with us.

ANTHONY GRAYLING, PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR: Great pleasure.

LEIGH SALES: We've had guests on this program who've argued that religion is growing around the world and that in years to come it's going to have a greater influence on politics, but you believe quite the opposite.

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well I think it might be the case that what we're witnessing is anxiety on the part of people who have a religious faith and that the volume has gone up or they've made themselves much more visible in the public debate about all of those public policy matters which concern them.

And so we are having a kind of amplification of that point of view, but we're having it because they feel under pressure and because in fact, as polling everywhere shows, even if the United States of America, that really religion is on the back foot and perhaps diminishing.

LEIGH SALES: Presumably though it is still incredibly influential and powerful. You mentioned the United States. It's hard to imagine a presidential candidate there being elected if he declared that he was an atheist.

ANTHONY GRAYLING: That's certainly true at the moment I think. But the really interesting thing is the Pew polls which look at attitudes towards religion in the United States, and they found consistently over the last several decades that commitment to religion is diminishing.

Still considerable, of course, in the United States, but the really significant fact is that people under the age of 35, now quite a significant proportion of them don't have one or another kind of religious commitment.

And that means that in the future the constitutional secularism in the United States will very likely turn into an increased actual secularism.

LEIGH SALES: What do you think about politicians who wear their faith on their sleeve?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well in the United States of America, of course, as you pointed out, it's a necessity for them to do that. Here in Australia too in recent times, the present Prime Minister, this has been a feature of the way they've presented themselves to the public.

And I think this may be an artefact of the current quarrel that there is between people of religious outlook and people who don't share that outlook, because it is a noisy one and it is one which is very much a feature of most public debates ranging right the way from education through healthcare and international relations.

So if people do have some sort of faith, they feel that they need to stand up and be counted about it. But, once again, I can't help feeling that in this kind of situation, it's a mark as much of anxiety and a sense of perhaps defensiveness as it is of some major resurgence.

LEIGH SALES: But presumably the politicians must think they have something to gain from it politically, because otherwise they would perhaps try to hide their religious faith.

ANTHONY GRAYLING: I think that's right too, and I think it's because of a slight misinterpretation of the kind of information they get from pollsters and others.

If you take the example of the United Kingdom, there in the 10-yearly censuses, there is a question on the census which says, "What religion do you subscribe to?".

And quite a lot of people put down Christian because they are trying to communicate something about the background or the tradition or it's an alternative to a description of their ethnicity or something, and it doesn't really mean what it seems to mean.

It doesn't mean that they are regular attenders at church. For a long time the Church of England, the C. of E., has been Christmas and Easter and it's been nominal.

And this gives a slightly distorting picture of what the facts are in the population, but then you do get some politicians who will see this and think, well, perhaps I can appeal to the majority demographic because this is the kind of thing people say in census returns.

LEIGH SALES: So when you write that religion is in its death throes, do you mean that at some stage, religion will disappear entirely or do you mean that its influence will wane?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: I think the latter. It's very unlikely indeed that it will ever go entirely. I mean, one feature of human history is that all the things that have been thought and done remain part of the geological strata of the human mind.

So, you know, in 100 years or 1,000 years there will still indeed be people who adhere to the old faiths.

But it is much, much more a matter of how influential these different faiths are. And there's a kind of inevitability about a process in which, because there is so many different faiths, there's so many different attitudes to questions of morality, the sheer plurality of these outlooks makes a demand of us, that to find a way for them to coexist and to do so peacefully it has to be in a dispensation which is neutral with respect to all of them.

And when that happens, the influence of any one of them is going to be extremely diminished.

LEIGH SALES: So, what would a world look like in which there was a limited influence from religion?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well I think a little bit like almost anywhere in the Western world other than the United States of America in, let us say, the '70s or early '80s. Because what happened there was that people who had some kind of faith commitment would be - would see it as much more a part of their private observance.

They wouldn't talk about it at dinner parties necessarily or push it on other people unless they were very zealous, and there were rather few of those.

And people who didn't have a religious commitment wouldn't mind if other people did privately and they wouldn't attack or criticise them.

So there was an unwritten agreement that the matter was going to be left quiet. So in a future where the religious organisations and religious individuals had returned to something much more private, much more inward looking, we might have that kind of public domain where people were able to rub along with one another with much less friction than we're seeing at the moment.

LEIGH SALES: If religion did come to have a more limited influence, how would it change the way that society then viewed and thought about death?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well, that's a very interesting and important question, I think, because it's a serious matter now that the way we think about the end of life, about dying, about how we care for and look after people who are experiencing terminal illness or unbelievable suffering, and how we see the state of death.

Because of course what one has to remember is that there is a very sharp distinction between dying as a living act and being dead, which is a quite different matter, a bit like being unborn.

And so attitudes towards death and dying would probably in that kind of situation change, and I'd hope that it would mean that we would be much kinder to the dying than we are at the moment. Because in almost all certainly Western countries, there is a debate going on about how we should respect the wishes of people who want to be helped to die, for example.

Most jurisdictions don't allow it; they still regard it as being a criminal act, to help somebody to die if they have a serious settled intention to die. And those attitudes and, I think, practices will change, as I say, I hope in a more humane direction, if we have this quieter settlement of the religious situation in our societies.

LEIGH SALES: Is it possible that it could go the other way, though, because if religion was less influential and perhaps more people didn't believe in God and were open about that, would there perhaps be a sense then that this life is all there is so therefore it must be prolonged as long as possible and perhaps it could have the opposite effect, it could have an anti-euthanasia effect?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well it may very well do. And of course this ties into a quite different and extremely interesting discussion about the fact that lives are lengthening anyway.

They've been lengthening by something like two years every decade right through the second half of the 20th Century. And with the dramatic increase in the capabilities of genetic medicine and of medicine generally, it looks as though people who are now in their teens and early adult will probably live well into their centenarian years - 120 years, 130 years is not an impossibility.

That raises a whole series of issues. Of course we know that unless we extend the retirement age, unless people continue to work, it's going to be very difficult, even for the richest economies, to support people with that age.

And if we don't overcome the problems of ageing; if people live till they're 120, but from 60 or 70 years on have the kinds of deficits physically and mentally that we experience now, that will be an even greater burden.

But it will be an equal sort of burden if people - for example, if women are able to have babies at the age of 90 or 110, what do you do then? How do you ration childbirth?

All sorts of other difficulties come into the picture which would need to be handled rationally and sensibly and not on the basis of views, outlooks on the world, which are - because they are rather ancient in their origins are really not flexible enough or not equipped enough to help us deal with them.

LEIGH SALES: What do you think of public funding going to church-run schools?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well, I'm very much against it and indeed I think a lot of people who are quite sort of deeply attached to the secularist agenda would say that this is a problem.

People have seen it, for example, in the United Kingdom, as a solution to a difficulty, which is that too many teenagers fall by the wayside and they don't get sufficient discipline from the way we school now and from their parents and that the ethos offered then by faith-based schools would help to make them much more responsible citizens.

But all you have to do is remember the example of Northern Ireland, where children were ghettoised into Protestant schools and Catholic schools, and this perpetuated the divisions within the community and led to the terrible strife that we've seen in the last half century.

And more, of course, because these divisions are present elsewhere in the world too between Muslims and Hindus in India, for example.

And so, if we could get children fully integrated with one another, quite independent of their ethnicity or the religious beliefs of their parents, if we could recognise that children are not Protestants or Catholics or Muslims, but have to be made so by a process of endeavour, then we would at least have the chance of creating a future in which people didn't identify themselves according to artificial divisions, where there might be a possibility of greater fraternity between people.

LEIGH SALES: In the US in particular, and I'm sure in other places, some Christians argue that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution and that that is balanced. What do you think?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well I think that that argument is exactly the same as the argument which says astrology ought to be taught alongside astronomy, or magic ought to be taught alongside modern medicine. It's just simply and utterly inappropriate. It's not part of the same story at all.

There's no question but that children when they learn history should learn something about the religious traditions of the past and the contributions they made and the problems they caused. They should certainly learn about these things and part of that of course would have all the many, many different methologies about the beginning of the world and how life was brought about on this planet.

But that ought to be kept apart from serious science, which has a two-fold purpose. One, to communicate our best understanding of the world as it itself evolves; and the other, to teach disciplined teaching and inquiry and to encourage people to proportion their beliefs and the conclusions that they reach to the evidence that they have for them.

And if you are going to introduce something like intelligent design into biology classes you're going to muddle those two things together, which is exactly of course what the proponents of intelligent design want and interfere with the process of a proper scientific education.

LEIGH SALES: On this idea of inquiry and science, let's turn to a subject that's much in the news lately, which is climate change. What do you think of the suggestion that balance in a climate change debate is to have a climate scientist verse a climate sceptic?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well, this would be an example of the well-intentioned desire to get both sides of the argument out there into the public domain so that people can try to evaluate it and make up their minds.

And the problem with that of course is that something like 95 per cent of serious scientists recognise that there is a man-made problem about the climate and about what's happening with warming of the Earth's climate.

And there are sceptics who have an investment of one kind or another in there not being man-made climate change, not all of home, indeed, rather few of whom, are scientists.

And what we need therefore is before we have a debate between a sceptic and climate scientist is a good deep investigation of what's at stake on both sides of the argument and of where the evidence points, really, and of why the majority of responsible scientists are convinced that they're seeing something that we are responsible for and that we ought to do something about.

But I should mention this: one thing which is completely left out of this discussion is this: even if the climate isn't warming, even if this were just a local historical phenomenon in the planet's history, trying to do something about diminishing CO2 emissions, trying to do something about conserving the resources of the Earth can do no harm.

Even if there weren't climate change, why not be responsible about it anyway and ensure that there is a long term future for the planet and for our grandchildren and their children?

LEIGH SALES: That sort of fits with what I wanted to ask you next which is about the idea of doing good. You in your book 'Thinking of Answers' have a chapter headed 'Happiness and the Good' and it's subtitled 'Does being happy make us good and does being good make us happy?' What is the answer to that?

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Well, the first thing that one has to remember is that the surest way of being unhappy is to pursue happiness itself. Happiness, when it comes - and what we need to do is analyse it and try to make better sense of what we're talking about there, and we're talking about something like a sense of doing things that are worthwhile, a sense of flourishing, a sense of being well-related to other people that we care about.

All that sort of thing, which is what constitutes happiness, is something that would come as a consequence of doing things that are worthwhile, of pursuing certain aims, moulded to our talents for achieving those aims, which are genuinely, intrinsically valuable.

Learning, trying to understand the world better, trying to do a bit of good for other people.

You know, they say if you want to be happy yourself, make other people happy. Well that means being externally directed, it means thinking about others, and it means getting up in the morning with a genuine desire to add something which you yourself recognise as valuable, always of course subject to the harm principle, as John Stuart Mill called it, which is you don't do harm to others or interrupt them in their endeavours to do this too.

And then as a kind of side issue, you get this feeling that life is good to live. And that's what happiness consists in.

LEIGH SALES: Professor Grayling, we're out of time. Thankyou very much for joining us. I hope you enjoy your time in Australia.

ANTHONY GRAYLING: Thankyou very much indeed.

Do you have a comment or a story idea? Get in touch with the Lateline team by clicking here.